Immensity Quotes - Page 3

• In fact, since the accident, Mom doesn't love anyone. She is marble. Beautiful. Frigid. Easily stained by her family. What's left of us anyway. We are corpses. At first, we sought rebirth. But resurrection devoid of her love has made us zombies. We get up every morning, skip breakfast, hurry off to work or school. For in those other places, we are more at home. And sometimes we stagger beneath the weight of grief, the immensity of aloneness.

  Ellen Hopkins

  Beautiful, Mom, Morning

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• It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible

  Italo Calvino

  Writing

  "Enter the maze" by David Mitchell, www.theguardian.com. May 22, 2004.

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• When I consider the small span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the small part of space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to see myself here instead of there … now instead of then.

  Blaise Pascal

  Space, Infinite, Eternity

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• Ecclesiastes names thee Almighty, the Maccabees name thee Creator, the Epistle to the Ephesians names thee Liberty, Baruch names thee Immensity, the Psalms name thee Wisdom and Truth, John names thee Light, the Book of Kings names thee Lord, Exodus names thee Providence, Leviticus Sanctity, Esdras Justice, creation names thee God, man names thee Father; but Solomon names thee Compassion, which is the most beautiful of all thy names.

  Victor Hugo

  Beautiful, God, Kings

  Victor Hugo (1980). “Les misérables”, Viking Pr

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• What shall I do, singer and first-born, in a world where the deepest black is grey, and inspiration is kept in a thermos? with all this immensity in a measured world?

  Marina Tsvetaeva

  Inspiration, Black, World

  Marina Tsvetaeva (2011). “Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems”, p.86, Carcanet

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• Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books-- Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Book, House, Tree

  Jane Hirshfield, “Tree”

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• I would not see our candle blown out in the wind. It is a small thing, this dear gift of life handed us mysteriously out of immensity. I would not have that gift expire... If I seem to be beating a dead horse again and again, I must protest: No! I am beating, again and again, living man to keep him awake and move his limbs and jump his mind... What's the use of looking at Mars through a telescope, sitting on panels, writing books, if it isn't to guarantee, not just the survival of mankind, but mankind surviving forever!

  Ray Bradbury

  Horse, Moving, Book

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• Truth is always stranger than fiction. We craft fiction to match our sense of how things ought to be, but truth cannot be crafted. Truth is, and truth has a way of astonishing us to our knees. Reminding us, that the universe does not exist to fulfill our expectations. Because we are imperfect beings who are self-blinded to the truth of the world’s stunning complexity, we shave reality to paper thin theories and ideologies that we can easily grasp – and we call them truths. But the truth of a sea in all it’s immensity cannot be embodied in one tidewashed pebble.

  Dean Koontz

  Reality, Self, Sea

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• The sky puts on the darkening blue coat held for it by a row of ancient trees; you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight, one journeying to heaven, one that falls; and leave you, not at home in either one, not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses, not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes a star each night, and rises; and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel) your life, with its immensity and fear, so that, now bounded, now immeasurable it is alternately stone in you and star.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Stars, Fall, Sunset

  Rainer Maria Rilke, “Evening”

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• Down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way, till a void boundless as the nether sky appeared beneath us, and we held by the roots of trees and hung over this immensity; but I said: if you please we will commit ourselves to this void and see whether providence is here also.

  William Blake

  Sky, Roots, Tree

  William Blake, W. H. Stevenson (2007). “Blake: The Complete Poems”, p.122, Pearson Education

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• The sight filled the northern sky; the immensity of it was scarcely conceivable. As if from Heaven itself, great curtains of delicate light hung and trembled. Pale green and rose-pink, and as transparent as the most fragile fabric, and at the bottom edge a profound fiery crimson like the fires of Hell, they swung and shimmered loosely with more grace than the most skillful dancer.

  Philip Pullman

  Fire, Light, Sight

  Philip Pullman (1995). “Northern lights”

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• There is nothing so charming as the knowledge of literature; of that branch of literature, I mean, which enables us to discover the infinity of things, the immensity of Nature, the heavens, the earth, and the seas; this is that branch which has taught us religion, moderation, magnanimity, and that has rescued the soul from obscurity; to make her see all things above and below, first and last, and between both; it is this that furnishes us wherewith to live well and happily, and guides us to pass our lives without displeasure and without offence.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Knowledge, Mean, Sea

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• The questions that used to bother me at times, do not weigh anything before the immensity of a wake so close to the sky and filled with the wind of the sea

  Bernard Moitessier

  Wind, Sea, Sky

  Bernard Moitessier (1995). “The Long Way”, p.4, Rowman & Littlefield

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• O how all things are far removed and long have passed away. I do believe the star, whose light my face reflects, is dead and has been so for many thousand years. I had a vision of a passing boat and heard some voices saying disquieting things. I heard a clock strike in some distant house... but in which house?... I long to quiet my anxious heart and stand beneath the sky's immensity. I long to pray... And one of all the stars must still exist. I do believe that I would know which one alone endured, and which like a white city stands at the ray's end shining in the heavens.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Stars, Believe, Heart

  Rainer Maria Rilke, “Lament (O How All Things Are Far Removed)”

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• What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Love, Sex, Real

  "The Powerbook". Book by Jeanette Winterson, 2000.

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• Each of the major sciences has contributed an essential ingredient in our long retreat from an initial belief in our own cosmic importance. Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among millions; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Home, Average, Taught Us

  Stephen Jay Gould (1992). “Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History”, p.147, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Would words shatter the immensity of life and death so close to one another?

  Susan Abulhawa

  Life And Death

  Susan Abulhawa (2010). “Mornings in Jenin”, p.233, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Dinosaurs are the best way to teach kids, and adults, the immensity of geologic time.

  Robert T. Bakker

  Kids, Adults, Dinosaurs

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• Each particle of matter is an immensity, each leaf a world, each insect an inexplicable compendium.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  World, Matter, Inexplicable

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• A source of cheerfulness to a good mind is the consideration of that Being on whom we have our dependence, and in whom, though we behold Him as yet but in the first faint discoveries of His perfections, we see everything that we can imagine as great glorious, or amiable. We find ourselves everywhere upheld by His goodness and surrounded by an immensity of love and mercy.

  Joseph Addison

  God, Discovery, Perfection

  Joseph Addison (1872). “The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison”, p.359

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• So multifarious are the different classes of truths, and so multitudinous the truths in each class, that it may be undoubtingly affirmed that no man has yet lived who could so much as name all the different classes and subdivisions of truths, and far less anyone who was acquainted with all the truths belonging to any one class. What wonderful extent, what amazing variety, what collective magnificence! And if such be the number of truths pertaining to this tiny ball of earth, how must it be in the incomprehensible immensity!

  Horace Mann

  Men, Class, Names

  Horace Mann (1867). “Thoughts”, p.61

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• The process is learning to turn your back on everything and everyone and face that immensity. And only after you've done that can you then turn around and face the world again with new, clear eyes.

  Frederick Lenz

  Eye, Done, World

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• Man finally knows that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the Universe, from which he emerged by accident.

  Jacques Monod

  Art, Philosophy, Men

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• At a time when it's possible for thirty people to stand on the top of Everest in one day, Antarctica still remains a remote, lonely and desolate continent. A place where it's possible to see the splendours and immensities of the natural world at its most dramatic and, what's more, witness them almost exactly as they were, long, long before human beings ever arrived on the surface of this planet. Long may it remain so.

  David Attenborough

  Lonely, Long, People

  "Life in the Freezer". Documentary, www.imdb.com. (1993 - ).

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• Advanced meditation is facing the immensity of eternity, embracing that which terrifies you and frightens you and loving it because it's God. You are God.

  Frederick Lenz

  Meditation, Eternity, Samadhi

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